UDW: Summary Day 1 – Outlook Day 2

Ubuntu Developer Week is in full swing and we’ve been off to a fantastic start: 420 people in one channel! WOW!

So let’s recap what happened yesterday:

Getting Started with UbuntuDevelopment: I did the first session myself and talked for two hours about Ubuntu Development, how to set up your development environment, how it all fits together and we even got to building a simple package. At times I was frantic because there were so many great questions, but it was a lot of fun.

$quickly fun: Rick Spencer and Didier Roche held the next session about quickly, the fantastic new way to create applications. During their talk they created an application that quickly searched linuxsearch for queries. It was great to see that the regular stuff like setting up the application, UI, licensing, packaging, releasing, etc. done so easily and … quickly.

Packaging Perl Modules: Jonathan Yu (and gregoa, jackyf, mogaal and Ryan52) from the Debian Perl team delivered an awesome session on packaging Perl modules. Not only did they show how to package Locale::Msgfmt from CPAN, they also talked a lot about how Debian and Ubuntu developers cooperate in the team. Hopefully the Perl team found a few new contributors yesterday. 🙂

Fun with Python Plasmoid: Aurélien Gâteau and Jonathan Riddell ran the last session and showed how to easily bring new beauty to the KDE4 desktop by using Python and Plasmoids technology. KDE fans around the world will soon be able to enjoy more and more goodness on their Desktops. ROCK ON!

The great thing is: Ubuntu Developer Week is not over yet – this was just the first day! So let’s see what Day 2 has to offer:

Fixing small bugs in Ubuntu: this is the easiest way to contribute to Ubuntu. You don’t need to be an experienced hacker to help out fixing small bugs. It’s easy and a lot of fun!

Kernel Triaging and Debugging: Together with Leann Ogasawara you’ll plunge into the depths of one of the most critical packages in Ubuntu: the Linux Kernel. Find out how to successfully debug it and how to read Kernel bug reports.

How to update a package: It’s Didier Roche again. He’ll show you how to take a package and update it to a new upstream version and bring in the latest upstream goodness.

Using the LP API for fun and profit: You wrote a small script or an application that needs data from Launchpad. No problem! Leonard Richardson is just the man to talk to. He wrote large parts of the LP API himself.

Writing Apport Package Hooks: Brian Murray is going to talk to you about apport, the friendly crash catcher. The great thing about it is that you can easily get more data (on a per-package level) or even query the users to provide more data, so you don’t have to ask the same questions on bug reports over and over again.